Origin EON17-S Gaming Notebook Review: Opening A Can Of RAID

Performance - Competitors, Processor, General, Hard Drive

Performance - Competition

The Origin EON17-S is without a doubt the most impressively equipped gaming laptop we’ve reviewed. It’s normal for companies to send us a relatively decked-out configuration, but Origin really went bananas here.

For comparison we’re going to be using several recent gaming laptops including the Alienware M14x, the Alienware M17x and the ASUS G75V. These laptops all have different processors, so this will provide a decent cross-section of quad-core processors.

Speaking of which, let’s dive into the processor benchmarks.

Performance - CPU Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra is a good way to look at the maximum performance potential of a laptop. This laptop is equipped with an overclocked Ivy Bridge quad-core, so it should do well. Let’s have a look.

There’s certainly an improvement here over the ASUS G75V and its Core i7-3720QM, though perhaps not as much as I expected considering the overclock potential in this laptop. Still, taking an Ivy Bridge quad and making it a bit faster predictably results in an extremely quick part, one that will easily defeat anything else on the market and also go toe-to-toe with last generation Core i5 desktop parts.

Now let’s move on to 7-Zip and Peacekeeper.

Again, the results here are predictable, though a bit more favorable. Peacekeeper, which does not stress multiple cores, is particularly quick - the Origin EON17-S has a significant lead over the next-quickest part. The overclock quoted on this laptop is a Turbo Boost maximum, and the 4.4 GHz number can only be achieved in limited situations where one or two threads are being heavily tasked.

Now let’s look at some real-world performance tests to see if these benchmarks indicate a better experience.

Performance - General

We’ll start with Windows Live Movie Maker. Our test counts the seconds required to encode a video created in Window Live Movie Maker to a 1080p .WMV file.

The Origin EON17-S is a bit quicker than the ASUS G75V, but only a bit. The difference is extremely small and would be hard to notice if you didn’t have a stopwatch beside you. The moral of the story is that all of these Ivy Bridge quads are quick, and handily defeat even the previous Sandy Bridge parts.

Now let’s look at batch photo editing with SunlitGreen BatchBlitz.

Well, another benchmark, another small victory for the Origin EON17-S.

I think that the processor benchmarks show clearly that upgrading to the Core i7-3920XM isn’t worthwhile. It costs about $1000 to make the leap, and in return you receive very minor upgrades in performance. And this is in situations specifically tailored to show the differences between components. In normal everyday use, and while gaming, there’s not going to be any difference between the Core i7-3920XM and a less expensive Ivy Bridge quad. Save your money - buy a less expensive quad-core.

Performance - Hard Drive

I like to run hard drive benchmarks to be complete, but normally they are not exciting. Mechanical drives all perform similarly, and that’s what most laptops ship with.

The Origin EON17-S, however, ships with two 120GB that are configured in RAID 0. What does that do to performance? Here’s a hint: you should make sure your jaw is currently located above a soft surface.

Yep. The two 120GB Corsair Force GT hard drives in RAID 0 aren’t just fast. They’re insane. Even the ASUS G75V, which also contains a solid state drive, is creamed by this pair. The normal mechanical hard drive in the Alienware M14x hasn’t a prayer – it’s about an order of magnitude slower overall.

Let’s see if HD Tune replicates these results.

The burst rate on this laptop is so high that it annihilates the formatting of my graph, and sustained transfer speeds are nearly 1GB/sec. That’s just absurd, crazy, bonkers - I don’t even know what else to say. Certainly, solid state drives have shown this to be possible in the past, but to see this kind of performance coming from a laptop is incredible.

Hell, it’s probably overkill, but the real-world benefits were noticeable. Games load with blazing speed on this laptop. The save game that I use to test Civilization 5, for example, is 375 turns in on a large world. It normally takes forever to load on any laptop, but the Origin EON17-S had it handled in just 36 seconds.